How to Measure Text?
…the words we join have been joined before, and continue to be joined daily. So writing is largely quotation, quotation newly energized, as a cyclotron augments the energies of common particles circulating.
- Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era
This month marks the beginning of the complicated process of starting up the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator (Kenner would haved called it a “cyclotron”), buried beneath the Franco-Swiss border. Near the top of the LHC’s agenda is having a peek into the fabric of space-time to see about the Higgs-Boson, the theorized source of mass.
But to do so they’ll need data–lots of data. According to CERN, the event summary data extracted from the collider’s sensors will produce around 10 terabytes daily. That is something like, to use the cliché, the equivalent of a Library of Congress’s worth of data every day (the raw data is much much greater).
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About the Author
Chris Forster
Chris Forster is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at UVA.
Read more about Chris and access his other posts here.
